Category Archives: Pandemic

Today we look at sicknesses gone by and consider them to be ancient history. Nobody gets things like whooping cough, polio, or tuberculosis anymore, right? We’ve got vaccines for that!

Well sure, except for the fact that it isn’t true. For example, in 2007 over 13 million folks had TB. In 2010 almost 9 million new cases were recorded.

Or this year in Washington State, awfully close to home, whooping cough is going around. The state Health Department says that they think we’ll set a new record for pertussis in 2012.

Recently our kids came home from school talking about how they learned that there’s a new strain of polio that is resistant to vaccinations and drugs.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on concerns from stuff like the new bird and swine flu developments from various labs or influenza, or goodness knows what folks are cooking up in labs for “research”

We see it all the time. Formerly benign strains develop resistances to drugs, resulting in new generations of bacteria and viruses that we can’t treat with the drugs that we have.

MRSA, anyone?

Most human viruses replicate every 4-36 hours. And they don’t just create a couple new viruses, they can create 100 of new viruses each reproduction cycle.

To make the impact a bit more clear, a single virus that replicates every 12 hours and generates about 100 viruses each cyle will go from 1 virus to 100,000,000 viruses in two days. And every single one of those viruses has a chance to mutate into something else.

We think we can play God, and can control the spread of diseases. And all we do is create new ones that are resistant to our efforts. All it takes is ONE replication cycle that generates a new mutation that increases the virus’ lethality and the next pandemic is born.

Simple mathematics and probability make this inevitable. A simple matter of time.

Aside from economic issues, the spread of disease and potential pandemics is the thing that worries me the most. It’s one of those things that has happened quite a few times before, and will continue to happen.

Right now there is a wave of some sort of cold or flu rapidly progressing through the Kearney household. As you parents know, that means that we get less sleep while we stay up to tend to our sick kids, which in turn reduces our immune system and then we get it. And nobody likes… Continue Reading